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Go Computer Now! How Sphere Corporation Invented the Modern Microcomputer—Then Disappeared
What if you led a revolution and no one noticed? In 1975, the brilliant twenty-five-year-old engineer Mike Wise and a few hand-picked associates started Sphere Corporation in the sleepy suburb of Bountiful, Utah. Together, they designed and delivered a pioneering desktop personal computer, two years before Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack popularized the idea. But after selling over a thousand systems, Sphere crumbled and fell through the cracks of history—until now.
Based on extensive interviews and archival material, Go Computer Now! tells the lost story of Sphere: The rise and fall of a scrappy and ambitious company; its remarkable, flawed computers; and the influential community of customers who kept their cathode-ray screens glowing long after Sphere’s own offices went dark.
It is also the story of Mike Wise, an imperfect visionary who poured energy and rare inventiveness into a company that couldn’t quite deliver then watched from afar as others found fame and fortune in the future of his imagining.
Bill Gates remembered Sphere. So did Steve Wozniak. In this entertaining and compelling book, Ben Zotto asks whether you should, too.
Carefully documented yet written to appeal to a nontechnical, curious audience, the text is profusely illustrated with color photography and archival material. Detailed endnotes and professional index. Offset litho printed, bound in hardcover.
Based on extensive interviews and archival material, Go Computer Now! tells the lost story of Sphere: The rise and fall of a scrappy and ambitious company; its remarkable, flawed computers; and the influential community of customers who kept their cathode-ray screens glowing long after Sphere’s own offices went dark.
It is also the story of Mike Wise, an imperfect visionary who poured energy and rare inventiveness into a company that couldn’t quite deliver then watched from afar as others found fame and fortune in the future of his imagining.
Bill Gates remembered Sphere. So did Steve Wozniak. In this entertaining and compelling book, Ben Zotto asks whether you should, too.
Carefully documented yet written to appeal to a nontechnical, curious audience, the text is profusely illustrated with color photography and archival material. Detailed endnotes and professional index. Offset litho printed, bound in hardcover.
448 pages, Hardcover
Published April 2, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 3, 2026
I also once found an old computer on the streets of San Francisco, but I didn’t write a book about it - maybe I should have? Loved learning more about this wild era of personal computing ambition. And the photos were amazing.
May 28, 2026
I picked up this book at the author's Kickstarter as it was a piece of early microcomputer history I wasn't aware of. I knew nothing of Sphere and those I asked who were active in Silicon Valley just a handful of years after Sphere had never heard of them. While there were a lot of early microcomputer companies, Sphere seems to have implemented ideas before many others.
The tale is facinating, while sad. The computer savant, Mike Wise, was a fountain of ideas. His insight was to create a complete computer that could be used at home or in a business. The resulting machine was complex, but when put together, was far in advance of the Altair 8800, the microcomputer darling of 1975.
Sphere used a 6800 CPU, a processor that I only know about in passing. 68000 & 8086/8088, yes. Altair used an Intel 8080 that folks in the book say had a lot of cruft from the 8008. The 6800 was a clean sheet design with a lot of supporting chips available to build out a whole system. Like in a lot of things, the format/design that becomes popular is a mess while the better thought out solution loses. (I'm biased to 68k/PPC) It was neat to see how the group as Sphere approached building something that was smaller and cheaper than a minicomputer. But they had a lot of problems to overcome.
The design worked, but there were a lot of issues encountered by those who built the kits. They used a linear power supply that was external and the kit came with incorrect resistors. The boards that handled the CPU, video, and I/O were of a standardized size, making it supposedly easy to swap out boards. Instead of a backplane, they used ribbon cables to connect them, a design descision that was unique to Sphere. As the author points out, it came back to haunt them.
Even with all of the problems, Sphere was able to garner a core group of users that loved the machine. The stories about the dentists who ran the newsletter for years after the company folded is a case in point.
While first, Sphere couldn't make adjustments once they had their initial design. Quality control was a big issue, one that they leaned hard on their initial buyers to learn from. The fiasco with BASIC was another. I think the lack of BASIC was the eventual deal killer. The solution Sphere came up with was a super hack of using BASIC from a 16-bit HP minicomputer, using an emulator to make it all work. Instead of licensing a BASIC or making their own, they resorted to this pretzel logic of a solution, which was so slow as to be useless. Plus it needed 20k to work, which doubled the cost of the machine. Microsoft BASIC fit in 4k, which is an amazing feat.
The sad part was the people were trying, but they were in over their head. Mike Wise walked out one day and never returned. He did that with A-Systems, too. While a savant, he couldn't gather folks around him that could run with his ideas, letting him just be the idea guy.
I think not being in Silicon Valley was both a blessing and a curse. They could pursue their design without noise, but at the same time they couldn't tap into a wide pool of technical talent. Mike Wise demoed the Sphere at the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975. Supposedly they showed a prototype color board that Woz saw, which gave him inspiration to add color to the Apple ][ design. An interesting story of correlation of many future players in the coming wild west of microcomputers.
The end of the book has a paragraph of what happened to each of the main players discussed in the book. The author included a wealth of pictures of the system, boards, cassettes, scrapbook pictures, plus the ads for the Sphere. It clearly demonstrates it was real, the system had a lot of potential, but as the author says near the end, they were a bit too early. The market wasn't ready & the message of Sphere wasn't fully absorbed. If they had lasted to the first West Coast Computer Faire, they may have had a chance.
The book will take its place next to many other computer history books I've collected over the years. This one is the most esoteric in my library, mainly due to the limited life of the company and it being overshadowed by others once 1977 hit.
The tale is facinating, while sad. The computer savant, Mike Wise, was a fountain of ideas. His insight was to create a complete computer that could be used at home or in a business. The resulting machine was complex, but when put together, was far in advance of the Altair 8800, the microcomputer darling of 1975.
Sphere used a 6800 CPU, a processor that I only know about in passing. 68000 & 8086/8088, yes. Altair used an Intel 8080 that folks in the book say had a lot of cruft from the 8008. The 6800 was a clean sheet design with a lot of supporting chips available to build out a whole system. Like in a lot of things, the format/design that becomes popular is a mess while the better thought out solution loses. (I'm biased to 68k/PPC) It was neat to see how the group as Sphere approached building something that was smaller and cheaper than a minicomputer. But they had a lot of problems to overcome.
The design worked, but there were a lot of issues encountered by those who built the kits. They used a linear power supply that was external and the kit came with incorrect resistors. The boards that handled the CPU, video, and I/O were of a standardized size, making it supposedly easy to swap out boards. Instead of a backplane, they used ribbon cables to connect them, a design descision that was unique to Sphere. As the author points out, it came back to haunt them.
Even with all of the problems, Sphere was able to garner a core group of users that loved the machine. The stories about the dentists who ran the newsletter for years after the company folded is a case in point.
While first, Sphere couldn't make adjustments once they had their initial design. Quality control was a big issue, one that they leaned hard on their initial buyers to learn from. The fiasco with BASIC was another. I think the lack of BASIC was the eventual deal killer. The solution Sphere came up with was a super hack of using BASIC from a 16-bit HP minicomputer, using an emulator to make it all work. Instead of licensing a BASIC or making their own, they resorted to this pretzel logic of a solution, which was so slow as to be useless. Plus it needed 20k to work, which doubled the cost of the machine. Microsoft BASIC fit in 4k, which is an amazing feat.
The sad part was the people were trying, but they were in over their head. Mike Wise walked out one day and never returned. He did that with A-Systems, too. While a savant, he couldn't gather folks around him that could run with his ideas, letting him just be the idea guy.
I think not being in Silicon Valley was both a blessing and a curse. They could pursue their design without noise, but at the same time they couldn't tap into a wide pool of technical talent. Mike Wise demoed the Sphere at the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975. Supposedly they showed a prototype color board that Woz saw, which gave him inspiration to add color to the Apple ][ design. An interesting story of correlation of many future players in the coming wild west of microcomputers.
The end of the book has a paragraph of what happened to each of the main players discussed in the book. The author included a wealth of pictures of the system, boards, cassettes, scrapbook pictures, plus the ads for the Sphere. It clearly demonstrates it was real, the system had a lot of potential, but as the author says near the end, they were a bit too early. The market wasn't ready & the message of Sphere wasn't fully absorbed. If they had lasted to the first West Coast Computer Faire, they may have had a chance.
The book will take its place next to many other computer history books I've collected over the years. This one is the most esoteric in my library, mainly due to the limited life of the company and it being overshadowed by others once 1977 hit.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews